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The Journal · Vol. IV --:-- AEST New essay most weeks
Field notes from the ad floor

Notes from
the ad floor

The Target Ad Solutions journal — what we're testing, what the benchmarks actually say, and the occasional hill we'll die on. Written by the people running the accounts, not a content farm.

Six essays this season
by buyers, not ghostwriters
Featured essay Paid Social 7 min

Why creative testing beats audience hacking in 2026

The era of clever interest stacks is over. Meta's algorithm wants creative volume — here's the testing cadence we run for every social account, by Amelia Vo.

Read the essay
The archive

This season's essays

Everything is free, ungated and written to be useful even if you never hire us.

Google Ads benchmark spreadsheetGoogle Ads
8 min21 Oct 2026

Google Ads benchmarks for Australia: real CPC and CPA numbers

What we actually see across 60+ live AU accounts, by industry — plus why benchmarks mislead more than they help.

Jack Mercer · Head of Search
First-party data flow diagramTracking
6 min14 Oct 2026

Retargeting after cookies: what still works in 2026

Third-party cookies are dying but remarketing isn't — it moved to first-party. The stack we build for every client.

Liam O'Connor · Tracking & Data
Phone filming TikTok video on tripodTikTok
6 min7 Oct 2026

The small-budget TikTok ads playbook

Under A$2,000 a month, the rules change — one campaign, tight creative discipline, and knowing when to walk away.

Mia Chen · Creator Lead
Budget calculations in a notebookStrategy
7 min30 Sep 2026

How much should you actually spend on paid ads?

"It depends" is true and useless — here's the backwards maths we run in every audit call instead.

Daniel Rourke · Founder
LinkedIn ABM tiered audience diagramB2B
8 min23 Sep 2026

LinkedIn ads for B2B: a pipeline-first guide

A$14 clicks make sense when one deal pays for a quarter of ads — but only if you optimise for meetings, not clicks.

Rachel Kim · B2B Lead

Prefer doing to reading?

Everything in these essays is what we do daily for clients. If you'd rather have it done than read how it's done — that's the entire pitch.

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Browse by channel Google Ads Meta TikTok LinkedIn YouTube Retargeting
The Sunday teardown

One email a month. Zero fluff.

A single account teardown from the real world — what was broken, what we changed, what the numbers did. No product pitches, no "insights" listicles. Unsubscribes in one click, obviously.

One email a month, your address never leaves our list.

The index

Every essay, plain text

28 Oct · Paid Social
Why creative testing beats audience hacking
21 Oct · Google Ads
Google Ads benchmarks for Australia
14 Oct · Tracking
Retargeting after cookies
7 Oct · TikTok
The small-budget TikTok playbook
30 Sep · Strategy
How much to spend on paid ads
23 Sep · B2B
LinkedIn ads for B2B pipeline
Most shared this month

"How much should you actually spend on paid ads?" — forwarded 214 times, apparently mostly to CFOs.

Printed journal essay with margin notes
Journal logistics

About the journal

The people named on them — the same specialists who run client accounts. No freelancers, no AI drafts passed off as expertise. If Jack writes about benchmarks, it's because Jack pulled the numbers.

Yes — pulled from accounts we run or audited, anonymised where the NDA requires it. We're happy to show methodology on a call; invented case numbers would be a weird thing to stake a business on.

Generally no — the journal is our team's notebook, not a platform. Exception: practitioners with real account data and a specific thing to teach. Email the idea, not the draft.

Only where it intersects paid media — creative that works organically, tracking that spans both. We don't pretend to expertise we don't sell.
Editorial desk with printed campaign reports Drafted on Fridays, argued over Mondays